


Sleeping Beauty

by KeevaCaereni



Category: Passengers (2016)
Genre: Gen, Male Entitlement, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-29 02:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12072333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeevaCaereni/pseuds/KeevaCaereni
Summary: Aurora is not some princess in a fairy tale.





	Sleeping Beauty

The morning after Aurora finds out, he comes over at breakfast, asking to talk to her; she stands and walks away abruptly. He keeps showing up at every place she tries to settle. All she wants is to think, but as soon as she sits down, Jim appears, pained look on his face as he pleads for a chance to explain himself. She doesn’t want to hear it. Eventually she figures out the best way to avoid him is running; she loses herself in exercise and takes a different route each time so he can't track her. After two weeks of peace, she is jogging down the main concourse when Jim's voice blares out over the speakers. Aurora covers her ears but she can't block out the meaningless sound of him talking. Talking and talking, as if his reasons could ever be good enough to justify stealing her life from her.

Aurora punches the wall and sobs. He'd said he'd loved her.

 

* * *

 

Once she realises Jim is capable of hacking the ship, she moves out of her room and spends a month sleeping rough on the pod decks. She moves every time she wakes, slinking from pod bay to pod bay to avoid him. As she waits for him to find her Aurora looks at the people in the pods and imagines what they are like. One day, she stumbles across the midwife from before, when she played this game with Jim. She looks into the woman's face and tries to imagine waking her up, killing her future, just to have a friend.

She sneaks back up to the bar to steal a bottle of vodka and drinks it, curled under her pod bay. Not just a friend. Jim wants more than that from her. She throws the bottle at the wall and screams.

Drunk and angry, Aurora storms up to his room. She will not be reduced to hiding like a rat in the walls. He took her life from her but he will not take this too. She goes over to his bed and yells out her anger as she hits him. It's not enough, she can't hit him hard enough to make him feel like her, like a bird in a cage. She kicks him in the gut and reaches for the spanner next to his bed. Swinging it over her head, she hesitates. Jim lies there on the bed, not even covering his face to protect himself.

She drops the spanner. He might be a murderer, but he won't make one out of her. Let the fucker live with his guilt.

 

* * *

 

Aurora goes to the medbay and then the sushi restaurant. The robots won't notice a knife or two missing. The scalpel goes down the side of her bed, near the pillow, the sushi knife on her hip.

She won't kill him in cold blood, but she has spent a year with only him for company. She knows him. He won't give up. And she is done with letting him decide what she does.

When she wakes up to his face pale in the dim light next to her bed, Aurora doesn't hesitate.

 

* * *

 

Three months later, Gus wakes up. He asks about the empty pod, the other passenger.

"He woke me up," Aurora tells him. He looks at her, and doesn't ask anything else.


End file.
